Glossary

This is a list of words which both new and less new Rustaceans might not know the meaning of. Not all words here are Rust-specific.

Words which take only a couple of sentences to explain belong here.

See also Rust Tropes.

URLO
Short for users.rust-lang.org. This is the official forum for users of Rust.

IRLO
Short for internals.rust-lang.org. This is the official forum for discussing the design and implementation of Rust.

Rustacean
Rustacean is a term that is used to refer to rust programmers. It is a play on the word "crustacean".

RIIR
An acronym for "Rewrite It In Rust". Rustaceans notoriously try to rewrite everything in Rust.

RESF
Short for "Rust Evangelism Strike Force", used to mockingly refer to members of the Rust community who constantly promote Rust and demonize all other languages.

WG
Short for "Working Group" - a group of people who work to improve Rust in some way. See the official list of WGs.

RFC
An acronym for "Request For Comments". Completely separate from the IETF's RFCs, but with a similar concept. See [Request For Comments].

MSRV
Acronym for "Minimum Supported Rust Version". Many crates choose to support older versions of Rust, and so they set an MSRV.

UB
Undefined Behaviour; when writing code in a certain way allows the compiler to output any code it wants, usually synonymous with memory safety bugs. Safe Rust can never cause UB, but unsafe code can.

ZST
A zero-sized type, such as a unit struct (e.g. ) or the unit type. These types take 0 bytes to store and cannot contain data.

DST
A dynamically-sized type; a type whose size is not known at compile time. See DST.

RAII
An acronym for "Resource Acquisition Is Initialization", a concept where all data types you have access to are initialized on creation and freed on destruction, so that no values are ever invalid. Idiomatic Rust code uses this extensively. Also common in the C++ world.

HRTB
An acronym for "Higher Ranked Trait Bounds" - see Higher Ranked Trait Bounds for more info.

GAT
An acronym for "Generic Associated Types", an upcoming feature in Rust.